DEMONT: Dalhousie professor forges link from N.S. to Cuba

John Kirk, professor of Latin American studies at Dalhousie, has been a link to Cuba for many Canadian companies. (ADRIEN VECZAN / Staff)

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The other day, I had had it with the shrieking winds and the Kingdom of the North view everywhere I looked. So I donned multiple layers and trekked the hundred metres or so to where I knew I could get one of the city’s best cafe con leches.

At least on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings — which is when John Kirk, 63, works at home.

To make his strong brew, the chairman of Dalhousie University’s department of Spanish and Latin American studies uses a clunky-looking stovetop unit he bought for $12 in Cuba. The espresso is Cuban, too.

None of this is remotely surprising.

When Cuban Ambassador Julio Garmendia is in Halifax next month to give a talk at Dal and to meet with Premier Stephen McNeil and Mayor Mike Savage — trade between Nova Scotia and the island blossomed while his dad, John, was premier — Kirk will act as host.

Then, a few days later, Kirk will get on a plane and head for the Pearl of the Antilles, as Cuba is known, as he has been doing two or three times every year since 1977.

Amazingly, it’s not just the mojitos and the warm breezes that draw him.

“Because it is different,” Kirk says when I ask him why Cuba lives in his heart. “Because of the social justice component. Because it has the best education and health care in the developing world.”

Which makes him, to my mind, the perfect person not only to enlighten me about what the thaw in Cuba-United States relations means, but also to remind me that there is a place somewhere in this world that is not encased in solid ice.

When he comes to Cuba, you see, Kirk is all in.

He’s written or co-edited 15 books about the place. He’s translated for the late premier John Savage in discussions with Fidel Castro and had the RCMP crawling in the bushes outside of this very house when he dined here with Fidel’s older brother, Ramon.

Kirk, moreover, has consulted for Canadian companies operating in Cuba. For nearly a quarter century, he acted in Halifax for the Cuban fishing fleet active off the Atlantic Canadian coast, helping to negotiate fish quotas, translating and interpreting, and “getting drunk sailors out of jail.”

(“They paid me in fish and Havana Club,” he says.)

Three years ago, the Cuban government even pinned its Friendship Medal, akin to our Order of Canada, on Kirk.

So it’s no surprise that the obsession has rubbed off: a daughter — who, with her siblings, was once the target of death threats after Kirk put together a Halifax conference on the 30th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution — is a burgeoning Cuban scholar; and his wife, Margo, past executive director of Dalhousie’s daycare centre, has done a master’s thesis on the Cuban preschool system.

“It’s been an interesting almost 40 years,” he says with a verbal shake of the head.

Particularly when you consider how far it is from Kirk’s working-class roots in Liverpool, England. There, he grew up studious, sporty and mad about a certain local band that was starting to get a little airtime on British radio.

Paul McCartney, in fact, once asked Kirk’s cousin if he felt like travelling to Hamburg as a member of the Beatles because they were having some trouble with a rhythm guitar player by the name of John Lennon. The cousin declined.

“He now plays Christian rock in Florida,” says Kirk, who can tell a story.

We’re in no hurry, so Kirk tells me a few more: about how, for example, as a 20-something student at the University of British Columbia, he decided to do his doctoral thesis on the socio-political thought of Jose Marti, the poet, journalist and revolutionary.

And about how a research trip to Cuba deepened his passion for the hero of the revolution and sparked his obsession with Cuba itself.

It is, if you think about it, entirely fitting that Kirk would end up at Dalhousie on a one-year non-renewable teaching contract that has stretched for an additional 36 years.

Nova Scotia’s links to the island south of Florida are deep: as he points out, the first Cuban consulate in Canada was opened in Yarmouth in 1903.

The Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenburg has its share of stencils from companies from Havana and other Cuban ports doing business back in the days when ships left Nova Scotia with potatoes and lumber and then returned from Cuba with sugar and rum.

Believe me when I say that is hard to think about the bone-snapping cold outside when he tells you about being at a ceremony in Cuba celebrating Fidel Castro’s 70th birthday and being introduced as the president of Scotland by some Cuban dignitary. (Kirk handed him a model of the Bluenose.)

Or when he explains how one of Cuba’s literary lions, Leonardo Padura — with whom he co-authored a book on Cuban culture — wrote a novel in which a body found at Ernest Hemingway’s Havana estate is someone named John Kirk who is described as a “lame,” a “total alcoholic” and “defeated by life.”

That’s all old news. When I get all hard-nosed journo and ask Kirk about how long it will be before U.S. President Barack Obama’s plan to normalize relations with Cuba means the end of the American trade embargo, Kirk says “two years,” citing a slew of political and diplomatic complications.

Kirk will have more to say after getting together with Garmendia, and after he returns from giving three lectures in Havana. Down there, where Kirk stays at the same funky old Havana hotel that reminds him a little bit of the Lord Nelson, he will give the talks on Canada-Cuban relations, which have been going strong for 70 years.

He will see old friends. He will just walk around, soaking up life in this place that after all this time still beguiles him.

About the Author

Halifax-born Chronicle Herald columnist John DeMont studied English literature at Dalhousie University and journalism at the University of King’s College. He has been a columnist, Calgary bureau chief and Toronto-based investment writer for the Financial Post and a senior writer, long-time Atlantic provinces bureau chief and member of the Ottawa bureau for Maclean’s magazine.

DeMont has written eight books including Citizens Irving: the Irvings and New Brunswick, Coal Black Heart: the story of coal and the lives it ruled and, most recently, The Long Way Home: a personal history of Nova Scotia and The Little Tree By the Sea, a children’s book illustrated by his daughter Belle.

His books and magazine and newspaper articles have won many awards. He is married and has two children.

It's not surprising that I care deeply about Nova Scotia, since my DNA can be traced to some of the central groups that settled this place. The first DeMont was one of the “Foreign Protestants” brought over by the English in the hope of offsetting the cockney rabble that first landed in Halifax. The rest of my family tree is populated by disposed Scottish highlanders and English coal-miners like my grandfather who went into the pit in Cape Breton at age 11 and spent half a century underground.

I was a reader and a scribbler as a kid, turning the stuff I read and saw in movies and on the television—tales of cowboys, spies, monsters and heroes—into stories that other people may or may not have seen. And, I guess, I always been observing too; a couple of years ago a guy I knew from high school told me that he remembers me always being off to the side, checking things out. (Hopefully not in a creepy way.)

Once during a particularly aimless point in my life I had time to read a lot. During that period I read a novel by Ernest Hemingway. The protagonist was a journalist and I said to myself, hey you can make a living writing?

Besides my family and my friends, I’m passionate about a lot of things: the past, Nova Scotia, martial arts, indoor sports like basketball and outdoor sports like tennis and wandering around in the woods and near the waters, noirish books and movies, eating, drinking and cooking, and the craft of writing (whether articles or books.) The thing that matters most to me is my family.

The most memorable piece I wrote was a cover story for Maclean’s about the Irving family in New Brunswick—during which I spent a day travelling around the vast business empire with K.C.’s three sons—which also lead to a book about the secretive and powerful clan.

The most meaningful story that I’ve written was a piece for Herald Magazine about my parents and their descent into dementia from Alzheimer’s disease—a story which gave me some personal closure and also, based on the emails I received, articulated the experience of so many people who have lost loved ones to the disease.

I love the craft of writing, the challenge of taking complex, hard-to-fathom things and explaining them clearly and, hopefully, with a little elegance. I also love the way that journalism connects me to the world, in the process forcing me to figure out how I feel about the things that are happening around us. I’m a curious guy; writing columns for the paper allows me to follow my instincts, interests and passions, hopefully making them matter for readers, too.